The Impenetrable Forest Page 11

  Then the match went out.

  It was a classic horror show image in real life, and I reacted with the same let’s-leave-the-weapons-here-and-split-up logic that dooms so many movie characters. Without even pausing to think, I let out a yell, grabbed the nearest lantern, and leaped out the window in my underwear.

  Dashing across the wet lawn, I frantically pulled ants from my hair and swept handfuls of them from my skin, making a desperate attempt to stay calm. I thought of the gorillas and how they would simply move their nests if a trail of ants invaded during the night. No problem. With Liz away in Kampala, I had an empty, fully furnished house right next door. The empazi blitzkrieg in my bedroom would probably look a whole lot better after a good night’s rest. If I was lucky, the army would have moved on by morning.

  I walked across the yard, shivering in the misty cool night and shaking my head. People in the village already thought I was slightly crazy, living alone so close to the forest. They should see me now, I laughed to myself as I leaned forward to unlock the door. But all humor at my predicament disappeared in an instant, when the dark, shadowy wall of Liz’s house began to writhe, and a new wave of ants rushed up my bare arm. This is when panic truly set in. Dropping the lantern, I pawed spastically at my arms and face, and found myself suddenly screaming at the top of my lungs, completely out of control: “THEY’RE EVERYWHERE!!!”

  Ten minutes later I was huddled in the pit latrine, the only ant-free structure on our whole hilltop compound. I might have spent the night there if I’d thought to put on some clothes, but even Africa gets chilly in a pair of boxer shorts. When I regained some sense of composure, I returned to survey the situation. My house was a complete loss. The invaders commanded floor, wall, and ceiling space in every room, centering their attack on the kitchen, where I glimpsed ants pouring out of the cupboards and swarming over a bin of dirty dishes in a dense, almost liquid mass. Occasionally, a cricket, spider, or small lizard would fling itself down from the rafters, twitching spasmodically under a living blanket of tiny, voracious attackers.

  I grabbed a sweater and raced back to Liz’s house, where one chair and a coffee table seemed to have escaped the empazi’s notice. More importantly, I knew Liz’s cupboard contained two items crucial to my newly formed defense plans: a can of Doom bug spray and an unopened bottle of cognac. I used liberal amounts of both as the night wore on, and by morning, my mood placed me far beyond the leaky-roof crowd, mournful brides, and even Makale, as the most ill-tempered resident of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

  9

  Arming Makale

  He was evidently one of the largest-sized gorillas. In the gloom of the forest he appeared to us to be above six feet high. His jet black visage was working with an expression of rage that was fearfully satanic. His eyes glared horribly…. As it took the next step and appeared about to spring, Jack pulled the trigger. The cap alone exploded!… Almost as quick as thought Jack hurled his piece at the brute with a force which seemed to me irresistible. The butt struck it full in the chest, but the rifle was instantly caught in its iron gripe. At that moment Peterkin fired, and the gorilla dropped like a stone…not, however, before it had broken Jack’s rifle across, and twisted the barrel as if it had been merely a pipe cleaner!

  —R. M. Ballantyne

  from The Gorilla Hunters, 1890

  A change of seasons in Bwindi brought subtle but welcome variation to our daily allotments of heat and rain. January marked the beginning of the dry months, and the frequency of showers slowly tapered off until whole days might pass without a single drop of rain. The heavy tropical sun hammered red dust from hillside fields, and smoke from wildfires hung high in the air like a pall, muting the landscape to an understatement of tree shapes, valleys, and hazy green hills. Hiking became an exercise in sweat, with the swelter of midday weighing at my shoulders like a leaden cloak, and after a few weeks I found myself longing for the rains again. I asked Ephraim if the dry season was always so hot.

  “Sure. It’s too hot,” he affirmed solemnly with a shake of his head. We were sitting outside together, huddled in the tiny shade beside my house.

  “But then the wet season comes: too much rain,” added Betunga William with a laugh. He was lying in the grass with a shirt over his head. “You can see we are suffering.”

  Two hornbills rose in a brief lazy glide over the forest, as if testing the air. Their huge pied bills looked heavy as iron, and their drunken caws sounded thin and distant, muffled by sunlight.

  “Yes,” I agreed, smiling. “We are suffering here together.”

  Our suffering aside, the days of sunshine brought with them a new sensation to the forest: dry. Long-sodden laundry finally lost its musty smell, and the patches of mildew under my bed began to recede. The ceiling ceased its constant indoor drizzle, and I regained the use of pots and basins lost for months to permanent leak collection. People everywhere took the opportunity to patch their roofs, and the price of good banana fibers jumped three hundred shillings in the village.

  In the afternoon, clouds still massed and threatened, but any rain was usually brief and quickly swallowed up by the dry soil. Mornings dawned endlessly clear, with a chorus of forest birds singing upward to a dull blue sky slung low between hilltop horizons of green.

  Mountain gorillas apparently used the dry season to train for marathons and long-distance orienteering courses. Katendegyere group normally moved less than a mile a day, but in the dry months they could travel twice as far, climbing and descending a circuitous path through the steep-sided valleys. Their wanderlust didn’t stem from a sudden desire to explore the forest, and they weren’t necessarily trying to challenge their human pursuers. The motivation for their journeys was probably rooted in a far more simple impulse: thirst.

  Gorillas rarely drink standing water, relying instead upon the moisture in their diet of leaves, bark, and fruits, and the raindrops they lick from their fur during heavy showers. In the dry season, however, fewer plants produce fresh greenery, and the apes must range farther to ensure a steady supply of moist vegetation. They sought out the new growth in clearings and in the dense thickets along the forest edge. While they might linger in large openings like the burn on Rukubira Hill, they often crossed long stretches of closed forest to visit several feeding sites in a single day.

  In the thick tangle of forest glades, gorillas trample vegetation with the subtlety of small steamrollers, and their paths are easy to follow, but when a group travels quickly through closed-canopy forest where the undergrowth is sparse, their passing may displace only a few scattered leaves and twigs. It’s worse in the dry months, when their feet leave no prints and the vegetation springs back into place unaltered. At such times the trackers would usually split up, circling until one found a telltale sign: fresh dung, misplaced leaves, or a sapling stripped of its sweet green bark.

  Prunari and Charles divided to widen their search on one such occasion, while I waited where we had lost the trail. In a dry forest I couldn’t track my way out of a paper sack and knew when to let the professionals work undisturbed. I watched them moving farther into the shadows and began rooting for Charles, who had taken the easy, downhill path. But I had little hope; when mountain gorillas have a choice, they always go up.

  It was midafternoon, and the forest lay dim under the shade of thunderheads. The gorillas had circumnavigated the entire Muzabajiro River valley and led us to this point near the top of Rushura Hill. Their general direction pointed to the forest edge, and we expected to find them raiding banana plantations or feeding in the tangled stands of bracken just outside the park.

  I heard Charles give a long, questioning whistle from below, answered by a quick affirmative from up the slope. Sure enough, Prunari had found the trail again, and I heard the metallic ring of his panga as he began hacking through thick undergrowth near the park boundary. Charles and I followed up the steep hill and rejoined him as we emerged, squinting, into the full light of day.

  The forest edge stretche
d away to the south in a nearly straight line separating jungle from small farms along the Zairian border. Below us, cultivated fields descended in serpentine undulations to the broad flat plain of the Great Rift Valley. The immensity of the view was framed in the distance by a blurred shadow of the western rift escarpment rising up in Zaire. On clear days the Virunga Volcanoes would loom like distant pyramids, but now they were lost in clouds and dry season murk. The hillsides were blackened in patches from brushfires, and plumes of smoke rose slowly from the valley floor like hundreds of tiny reverse rainstorms, spilling upward to a sea of bluish haze.

  The dry season in Uganda is a time for burning. Throughout the region, farmers set their fields ablaze, spurring a growth of new grass for their livestock and clearing the ground for planting. In savanna landscapes, fire has played an important historical role in maintaining a balance between open plains and woodlands over time. Agricultural areas are more sensitive. Uncontrolled fires can actually damage the topsoil, and the loss of ground cover leads to increased erosion, but burning is still a popular farming tool. It provides a quick boost of fertilizing ash for young shoots and is by far the easiest way to clear new or overgrown croplands.

  Around Bwindi, selected fields like those below us were burned to prepare the ground for millet, a staple food and culturally important crop for the Bakiga people. Widespread African foodstuffs like bananas, potatoes, rice, and maize are all relative newcomers to the local diet, but millet has grown here for thousands of years, a hearty grain that thrives in the rugged hill country of southwest Uganda. Within two months the charred ground would be lush with knee-high stems of a green so pure it seemed to glow from within. Fields of young millet stand out against the cultivated hillsides like vibrant windows into an underworld of primal verdure.

  At harvest time women gathered in their family plots to pull up dry stalks, beating the red grain free with long-handled brooms and branches. Crushed and mingled with cassava flour, millet is served as a pasty starch called oburo, a vital dish at any wedding or holiday feast. Families store the dried grain in pots or large baskets to ensure a ready supply for any significant gathering, and young brides must make a gift of millet to their in-laws before they can be fully accepted by the family. Any surplus may be cooked into a watery sweet porridge or mixed with sorghum and fermented into a popular variation of local beer.

  “A man cannot dig millet,” Enos Komunda once told me. “Bananas, yes. Potatoes, yes. Even maize. But if a man touches millet, it will be sour,” he explained, spitting into the earth for emphasis.

  Watching the women toil and sweat in the steep hillside fields, I had a fairly good idea how that particular tradition was born. Bakiga men have a remarkable flair for keeping themselves on the feasting and beer side of agriculture.

  Prunari moved ahead again, tracking the gorillas’ path into a tangled thicket. We followed carefully. In thick vegetation, a sleeping gorilla is just another shadow, and more than once we had nearly stumbled into the midst of the group during their midday rest. Today, however, they were hungry after their long journey through the forest, and we soon heard them feeding nearby.

  Mugurusi barked in mild alarm at our approach, and we grunted a calm response, stopping about twenty feet from the shaking leaves. The group was invisible in the tall shrubs, but we could hear them belching and chewing around us, and glimpsed the occasional arm reaching up to grab at particular branches.

  We settled down in the leafy shade, and Prunari fell instantly asleep, while Charles pulled off his boots to adjust his tattered socks. I sat with my binoculars and notebook ready, trying to identify individuals in the group from brief flashes of black through the foliage.

  Clouds of insects hummed around me in the heat, landing and taking flight from my bare arms in a constant flurry, like tiny, living dust storms. I waved them away halfheartedly. In Africa, one soon reaches an impasse with flies. To fight them is a quickly learned lesson in futility, so you simply grow accustomed to their constant feathery touch. Watching one crawl slowly across the back of my hand I realized with a start that these weren’t flies at all, but perfectly formed black bees the size of a pencil point.

  Bwindi Forest harbors an immense and largely unstudied insect fauna, with at least six different species of tiny black bees. Stingless and docile, they were much favored by the Batwa pygmies as a source of medicinal honey. Dominic, a graduate student from Makerere University who stayed briefly in Buhoma, had studied the stingless bees of Bwindi for his thesis research. He told me of searching the forest for hives with a Batwa pygmy guide. They came into a small clearing, and the guide held up his hand for silence. From a cluster of white flowers, one stingless bee flew up and disappeared into the forest.

  “We wait,” the man said, and Dominic sat with him near the flowering shrub. Twenty minutes later the bee returned, and they watched it feed from the blossoms before it disappeared once again into the woods. Dominic sat mystified as they waited for the bee to make one more trip into the clearing. When it was gone the guide rose and they walked for half a kilometer through the trees, straight to the hive.

  This story impressed me. They say that the Batwa developed their uncanny knowledge of the forest from generations of living and hunting in its shady depths. Dominic’s guide recognized the species of bee and knew the type of rotten log where it was likely to nest. From the trajectory of its flight path and the time it took to make a round trip, he estimated the location of the hive. Simple.

  I watched a bee fly up from my arm. Its shiny black body vanished instantly into the leaves, a single ebony pinprick in a shifting curtain of green. My respect for the Batwa swelled at that moment to something approaching awe. With diligence and a lifetime to practice, I’m sure I could learn to track Katendegyere group through a dry season forest. But I’m equally sure it would take me more incarnations than a Hindu folk tale to master the art of tracking bees.

  An hour later I had given up on finding a clear view of the gorillas. They were aware of our presence and seemed unconcerned, and that was all we could hope for in the thick bush. I leaned back against a tree stump and closed my eyes. The trackers were discussing something in whispers when we heard a sudden grunt and the noise of a gorilla moving our way with purpose. Without looking, we knew that it had to be Makale. Scrambling to our feet, we watched him approach like a wave parting the greenery. He hadn’t charged in ten days, and we all crouched submissively, hoping to extend that streak.

  Shoving down a wall of leaves and branches, he came suddenly into view and stopped, appraising us with a dark-eyed glower. His pungent horse-and-sweat reek surrounded us, but he didn’t charge. We backed away slowly to our fifteen-foot distance, and Makale seemed satisfied. With a hostile glare he pushed the vegetation aside and stalked through the open place before us, stiff-legged, like a gunfighter at the swinging doors of an Old West saloon, all chest and swagger and heavy brow.

  Similar to charging or the chest-beat sequence, the stiff-legged walk displays a predictable level of gorilla aggression. Males reinforce the dominance hierarchy within the group by using these visual signals in minor conflicts over feeding privileges or right of way. Subordinate animals will either give way or return the gesture to escalate the challenge. The scale of the display indicates the animal’s level of anxiety, and used alone, stiff-leg walking is a relatively minor signal. Makale was annoyed with us but not particularly angry. He moved directly to an open area nearby and began feeding.

  We followed at a distance. Feeding in the midst of conflict can be a type of displacement behavior, where the individual’s aggression is redirected temporarily into a nonthreatening activity. Maintaining our presence with Makale was essential to advance his habituation, but none of us wanted to push him into charging. He kept one eye on our cautious approach, then turned away from us, crossed his arms over his chest and passed gas, a long, disdainful movement of air.

  With that gesture he dismissed us completely and focused on his meal. Soon others cam
e into the clearing: Karema, Mutesi, and a young black-back I recognized only from the parallel scars marking his nostrils. They were feeding on green vines that climbed and tangled in the low, shrubby branches. Tearing down handfuls, they pulled each strand through their wide mouths, neatly stripping off the leaves with an audible snapping sound.

  The second hour of habituation went perfectly, with the gorillas feeding, resting, and interacting among themselves as if we weren’t even there. We saw Mutesi displace Karema from her feeding site with a belligerent lunge and series of piglike grunts. She moved a few feet off, dragging a fistful of vines behind her, and continued feeding, apparently unperturbed. Makale watched the exchange with indifference before rolling onto his back to rest, one leg splayed upward like another dark trunk in the shadows. The younger black-back remained slightly apart from the others and moved out of sight after a few minutes. He was still maturing and spent most of his time near Mugurusi, the shy lead silverback. We rarely saw either of them clearly, and the trackers knew the young black-back only as “the small Makale.” He and Makale resembled each other closely and were probably brothers, but I hoped that the likeness ran only skin deep. With two Makales in the group, we’d all be professional bee trackers before Katendegyere was ready for tourism.

  Rain fell in heavy droplets, and the gorillas had retreated into a thicket when we finally backed away and started the long hike home. Prunari and Charles smiled and joked the whole way in spite of the weather. Every good day of habituation brought us closer to opening the group for tourism on schedule, an event that would bring both of them healthy bonuses from the gorilla program (IGCP).

  We paused for lunch under the dry eaves of a huge rain forest tree, its buttressed roots curving down around us like the arms of a starfish. Between mouthfuls of cold matoke and beans, Prunari gestured toward the forest and mimicked a gorilla scream, reenacting stories of habituation past. Charles laughed and joined the pantomime, slapping at the ground with two hands and tracing paths through the foliage where the gorillas had once charged in this very spot. The entire group had encircled them, chest-beating, tearing up vegetation, and charging repeatedly while the trackers cowered by the tree for over an hour.